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George H.W. Bush’s Persian Gulf War: Victory, with Tragedy

Most tributes on the passing of George H.W. Bush from across the
American political spectrum have used some variation of the word
“honorable” or “decent” to describe the
nation’s 41st president. By all accounts, in his direct
personal relationships, he was both. That he had physical courage
was amply demonstrated in his youth as a Navy torpedo bomber pilot
in World War II, and in his later years during his occasional
parachute jumps on his birthday. My strongest memories of Bush are
from the first post-Cold War crisis America faced—Saddam
Hussein’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent
Persian Gulf War. Bush’s actions during that fateful eight
months have affected the lives of millions in the nearly three
decades since, and mostly for the worse.

I had a unique vantage point to observe Bush’s response to
the crisis, being at the time a CIA military analyst who worked
what became known as Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. The
reports we generated at the National Photographic Interpretation
Center (NPIC) on Iraqi military moves were among the stream of
alarming intelligence sent to the White House between July 20 and
Aug. 1, 1990. That was the period when Saddam Hussein ordered the
key armored and mechanized infantry formations of his Republican
Guard Forces Command (RGFC) to head for the border with Kuwait.

NPIC and the National Intelligence Officer for Warning at the
time, Charles Allen, issued reports chronicling the RGFC buildup.
Allen’s office warned the White House that Saddam might try
to slice off the northern portion of Kuwait, whose oil fields the
Iraqi leader coveted. Instead of listening to Allen and his
analysts (or NPIC’s reporting), Bush chose to embrace the
“It will all blow over” advice he was receiving from
then-King Hussein of Jordan and then-Egyptian President Hosni
Mubarak. A former CIA-director-turned-president ignored advice from
his own intelligence professionals. Saddam’s tanks rolled
into Kuwait early on the morning of Aug. 2.

The final legacy of
Bush’s diplomatic work during and after the war was to draw the
United States ever closer to the brutal, corrupt regimes that
reside on the Arabian Peninsula.

By the morning of Aug. 5, Saddam’s advance reconnaissance
elements had actually briefly crossed the Kuwait-Saudi border. The
tracks of the Russian-made BMD reconnaissance vehicles were clearly
visible on the imagery I used to help write the high-priority
report NPIC issued that morning. Saddam had forward deployed two
RGFC divisions to within just a few miles of the Kuwait-Saudi
border. If he ordered them across, there was no credible military
force on the ground that could stop them.

This time, Bush listened to NPIC, Allen and others in the U.S.
intelligence community. He dispatched Vice President Dick Cheney
and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Colin Powell to Saudi
Arabia to brief the King on our ominous findings. Pledging that
Saddam’s aggression against Kuwait “will not
stand,” Bush gained clearance from the Saudi government to
deploy American troops to the kingdom. My colleagues and I kept
close watch on Saddam’s forces, looking for signs the RGFC
was preparing to invade Saudi Arabia. But instead, the RGFC pulled
back and dug in. Bush had stopped the Iraqi advance.

Iraq’s `19th Province’

Over the next several months, as more U.S. and allied forces
poured into the Persian Gulf region, Saddam dispatched dozens of
additional divisions to Kuwait. None of us working the Iraqi
problem felt sanctions would have the slightest impact on Saddam;
he’d already declared Kuwait to be Iraq’s “19th
province.”

Bush’s diplomacy during the autumn was masterful; that he
and then-Secretary of State James Baker were able to assemble so
many nations in support of ejecting Iraqi forces from Kuwait ranks
as one of his greatest foreign policy achievements. The greatest
may well have been convincing Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir
to keep Israel out of the war even after Iraqi missiles started
falling on its territory.

The war and its legacy proved far more problematic.

In mid-February 1991, during the height of the coalition air
campaign against Iraqi forces, Bush gave a speech at the Raytheon
Patriot missile plant. He called on the Iraqi people to rise up
against Saddam. Once Iraqi forces were ejected from Kuwait at the
end of the month, Iraqi Kurds in the north of Iraq and Shiites in
southern Iraq did as Bush asked—they openly revolted against
the regime and attacked the decimated but still functional Iraqi
military. The result was the predictable retribution and slaughter
against both minorities by Saddam’s forces.

But instead of ordering air strikes to help the rebels, or
sending American Special Forces to help, Bush let Kurds and Shiites
be butchered. The northern no-fly zone that the U.S. set up with
several allies to protect the Kurds wasn’t established until
after the Kurdish uprising was crushed in the weeks after the war
ended. And the no-fly zone in the south wasn’t put in place
until August 1992 and did nothing to stop the subsequent Iraqi
ground operations against the Shiite marsh Arabs.

Monitoring the Massacres

I had the grim duty of monitoring and reporting on the massacres
from NPIC. I could see the destruction to Shiite villages; I helped
map out the Kurdish refugee encampments for subsequent food drops.
In my life, I had rarely seen such a cynical and dishonorable act
by an American president as the encouragement, then abandonment, of
a people whose only desire was to be free of Saddam’s
tyranny.

Another group of Desert Storm survivors was abandoned by
Bush—sick veterans of that war.

By early 1992, reports surfaced of Desert Storm veterans
suffering from a constellation of symptoms that were subsequently
tagged in the press as “Gulf War Syndrome.” During the
last year of his presidency, Bush took no action to direct the
departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense to take seriously the
veterans’ claims that they were exposed to toxic agents
during the war.

Thousands were denied disability benefits and did not receive
proper examinations or treatments for their ailments. It would be
long after Bush left office that the federal government would,
haltingly and grudgingly, begin to honor disability claims from
Desert Storm veterans. Even then, federal officials continued to
deny that a toxic stew of low-level chemical agents and pesticides,
the mandatory use of untested nerve agent
“pretreatment” pills, and other toxins might be at the
root of their medical problems.

The final legacy of Bush’s diplomatic work during and
after the war was to draw the United States ever closer to the
brutal, corrupt regimes that reside on the Arabian Peninsula. The
most vicious of all is the mammoth of the two Bush rescued with
Operation Desert Storm, a fact driven home by Saudi Arabia’s
barbaric, American-supported war in Yemen and its murder of
journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

On a basic human level, all of us who have watched our parents
or grandparents leave this world can identify with the raw feelings
the Bush family has at this moment. Our empathy should not blind us
to the fact that George Herbert Walker Bush’s White House
tenure and legacy is a cautionary tale about the long-term human
costs of short-term, politically expedient presidential decision
making, both in war and its aftermath.